


The War I Could Not Win

by spelldlikedevon



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Angst, Canon, F/M, wondertrev
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 10:03:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11400327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spelldlikedevon/pseuds/spelldlikedevon
Summary: Diana reflects, 98 years later.





	The War I Could Not Win

Diana couldn’t breathe. She struggled against the metal bands that pinned her to the ground, growing tighter and tighter by the second. Her head was pounding and her vision was going black at the edges, but as she looked up she could see the blurred outline of a large airplane rising into the clouds. Images flashed through her head of a man with tousled hair and eyes blue as the waters of Themiscyra, helping her to her feet…cradling her face in his hands…running away.

“Steve…” she whispered, his name a prayer on her lips, her last goodbye.

Then the world exploded.

Diana gasped and her eyes flew open. It was 3:23 AM. The night was dark, and still. She sat up, chest heaving with racking sobs as tears streamed down her face. It had been nearly a hundred years since that day they turned the tide of the Great War, and still she cried for him. Cried for what could have been, what _should_ have been. Time had taken the edge off of her grief, and she had learned how to keep moving—keep living—but she never stopped missing him. Eventually the tears slowed. She sighed, wiping the last of them from her eyes, and leaned against the headboard, drawing her knees to her chest. Ninety-eight years. Barely an eyeblink for an immortal, but to a woman still in love, an eternity.

 

* * *

 

She stood alone in a small cemetery in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, the wind tugging at her long coat and blowing her hair into her eyes. It was the anniversary of the day she had lost Steve. She made this pilgrimage every year to lay flowers at his grave. For the first few years, she would spend time with his family when she came. She had told them stories of his heroism in the war and they had regaled her with tales from his childhood. One by one, though, they too had grown old and taken their places in this cemetery where she now stood. She was the only one left to honor his memory, his sacrifice. She knelt by the grave, laying her bouquet of morning glory against the headstone. The blue of the flowers stood in sharp contrast to the weathered gray of the rock. She’d chosen them because they reminded her of his eyes. The inscription on the tombstone hardly looked the worse for nearly a hundred years of wear, and she knew the inscription well: “Steven Rockwell Trevor, 4 May 1891 – 10 November 1918, Gave his life defending those he loved.”

They had had so little time. She let her mind flit from one happy memory of him to another. The first time he’d opened his eyes on the beach and looked at her. The way he’d jumped into the fight on the beach. Their conversation about Cleo’s treatises on bodily pleasure (that one still made her chuckle). Storming No Man’s Land and fighting side by side. The night they shared in Veld. Then her mind settled on the last time she’d seen him alive, and her heart twisted. She had been so disoriented, and barely able to understand him. He had run off as she was still trying to form the words “I love you, too,” and she had never gotten to tell him. She hoped he knew.

Her eyes filled as her fingers caressed the smooth stone. “Oh, Steve.” She sighed. “I have fought so many battles. I have slain gods and demons and saved the world of men again and again. I have been the victor in every fight…” her voice caught in her throat as the tears began to spill over. “Except with you. You were the only war that I could not win.” And the tears of the goddess fell on the grave of the mortal man.


End file.
